Overwrought Much? Thom Hartmann Compares GOP to Mafia, Third Reich

You know liberals are desperate when their hyperbole about Republicans turns the corner from absurd to unhinged. (audio clips after page break)

Thom Hartmann served up not one but two examples on his radio show this week.

Here he is on Monday alleging Republican attempts to suppress voter turnout through changes to voting laws and comparing this to organized crime (audio) --

I don't think of the Republican Party anymore as a political party. They're hiring, they're hiring criminals to, to, to, to change the voting polls, rolls. Their secretaries of state are stripping people off the voting rolls the way Greg Palast, he's talking about how down in Florida they've knocked over 80,000 people off the rolls simply because they have b-l-a after their name, they're black. I mean, they got excuses but that's really what's going on. And it's happening not just there. In Colorado, hundreds of thousands of people, I mean, there's, there's lots of people all around the country who are going to show up and try and vote in a couple of weeks or early voting even now and be told, sorry, I don't see your name here, you can fill out this provisional ballot if you want but by the way they never get opened, unless there's an audit, unless there's, you know, unless there's a battle at the last minute.

I think of the Republican Party more as an organized crime syndicate. It's behaving like the Mafia. Power at any cost. Ah, we gotta kill a few people (sarcastically). You know, Paul Krugman , both Paul Krugman and Nick Kristof, brilliant pieces in the New York Times in the last couple days about how Mitt Romney's health care policies would cause people to die. You think when I say, oh yeah kill a few people, I'm exaggerating? No, no, I'm not -- cause people to die.

As if this wasn't over the top enough, Hartmann yesterday resorted to hackneyed left-wing criticism of "the right" as comparable to "the Reich" (audio) --

Oh my goodness, the Republicans are, I mean, there's an absolute feeding frenzy, a mania, a panic going on on the right -- on the Reich -- in the blogosphere over there about, Candy Crowley's not gonna be a potted plant! We like the potted plant! We want Jim Lehrer back! We want another potted plant! We didn't know, you know, active moderator, oh that didn't work so well! Uh, you know, we need a potted plant! I gotta tell you, just personally, Candy Crowley has always been one of my favorite reporters.

A short time later a caller took Hartmann to task for likening Republicans to Nazis, with Hartmann shrugging off the criticism by claiming the comparison is "funny" (audio) --

CALLER: I feel like the election is slipping away and when you make puerile comments like calling the right wing 'the Reich' it doesn't help.

HARTMANN: OK, well, Mike, thank you very much for your advice. I will continue to call the right wing 'the Reich.' I don't consider that puerile, I think it's funny.

Hardly amusing, however, are the unsettling parallels between Nazi ideology and left-wing politics. The Nazis were, after all, avowed socialists, one of the few things about which they were honest. And their totalitarian leftist ideology survived the war and endured for decades -- in communist East Germany, not in West Germany and West Berlin with their horrible capitalists.

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